The Five Biggest Cloud Rivalries

There’s competition in every industry and cloud computing is no exception. In fact, since services and products in the cloud industry are so similar, there are some major cloud rivalries betwixt companies.

Let’s see what these companies are bringing to the battle in terms of interface, features and of course, price.

As of April 2012, Google users could store and sync data, up to 100GB, via Google Drive for 1.99 per month or 23.88 per year. File-sharing and collaborative editing are the main features of this easy-to-use interface.

And, for users with a little less than 100GB worth of information to store, the service is offered for free for up to 5GB. As of November 2013, Google Drive has 120 million active users. Yes – they play in the millions when it comes to users.

Microsoft OneDrive, formerly known as SkyDrive, offers 6 and 12-month packages that boast 20% and 22% discounts instead of a month-by-month payment. Unfortunately, exact pricing rates could not be found, however it is apparent OneDrive for Business is aimed towards organizations looking to build sites, migrate applications and run Windows servers and Linux machines.

IBM is a pretty big name in the business world, but does that brand translate to cloud computing? Well no prices could be found directly on IBM’s website at all. Features like collaboration, 5GB of storage, 22 language availability as well as email and calendar integration tell us, this isn’t for your individual cloud user.

IBM Connections is for corporations and organizations, who have the patience to sign in and sign up to receive pricing.

Amazon Cloud Drive on the other hand, might be just as big of a brand, with prices right on its homepage. 20GB per month costs only $0.83 per month or $10.00 per year. Photos, videos and documents can all be kept and accessed anywhere, anytime. However, unlike most of our other contenders, Amazon Cloud Drive doesn’t offer sharing, only syncing.

Box is a pretty well known service in the cloud arena. It brings the big guns with unlimited storage for $15.00 per month or $150.00 per year. Individuals can store up to 10GB of secure storage for free.

Just as well known is Dropbox, a file hosting service offering automatic syncing for easy file sharing. To counter Box, Dropbox offers free storage of up to 2GB. For 100GB of storage, rates are $9.99 per month or $99.99 a year.

Microsoft shows up again on our list, but this time against iCloud. Microsoft versus Apple, a classic duel. Microsoft OneDrive isn’t just for storing and sharing files, but also for creating them. Documents can be constructed in Word, Excel or PowerPoint, then shared for review and editing.

15GB of storage comes free with the option to add 20GB for $10, 50GB for $25 or 100GB for $50 annually.

For music storage and keeping data in mobile devices safe, iCloud has been helping customers out since 2011. As of July 2013, the service had 320 million users. Cloud backup makes sure users don’t lose any data and apps like Find My Friends and Find My iPhone have set this cloud service apart from the rest.

5GB of storage comes free with an option to upgrade to a larger plan. Add 10GB for $20, 20GB for $40 or 50GB for $100.

OneBigDrive vs. JoliCloud Drive

It’s obviously there are a ton of different cloud services being used by customers everyday, and honestly, most customers are using more than just one. Which brings us to our last and newest rivalry. Last week we covered the introduction of JoliCloud Drive, a service that combines other cloud storage services for one point access.

OneBigDrive (OBD) offers the same service as JoliCloud Drive. Download OBD and in one dashboard, search and find your files from any variety of cloud services. So how does one choose between the two? Well if it comes down to storage, OBG recently upgraded its free package from 32GB to 50GB. Read more about this here, “OneBigDrive Upgrades to 50GB of Free Storage.”

Conclusion

Well there you go, the five biggest rivals of the cloud storage industry, in a face off against each other.

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What do you think about all these rivalries and who’s winning in each scenario? Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

One thought on “The Five Biggest Cloud Rivalries”

re: OneBigDrive vs. JoliCloud Drive – these 2 services are distinctly different, though there is the similarity of both connecting to other cloud drive services into one system.

JoliCloud gives users one dashboard to get read/write access of the multiple cloud drives conveniently in one place, whereas OneBigDrive consolidates space from the multiple cloud drives and uses them for storage, to store encrypted files onto the unused space collectively.